Moving the Waters - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 115

chill water to its sinking point, or that armour-plating of sea ice, crys-
tallizing from the frigid waters, to add to the continuous downdraught
of dense brines. Sweeping downwards from each pole, the interlacing
loops of the Earth's ocean current system provide a supply of cold
and—crucially—oxygen-rich water to all parts of the world ocean.
They allow multicellular life forms to thrive almost everywhere, living
suspended in the water or on the sea floor, even in pitch darkness at
great depths and crushing pressures.
The deep life of the oceans came as something of a shock to the
world of nineteenth-century science. The persuasiveness and charm
of one of the greatest—and nicest—naturalists ever to have lived had
quite a lot to do with this. Edward Forbes was born on the Isle of Man,
and on that island he developed an interest in animals and plants that
never left him, even when he should have been moving on to the
more serious business of earning a living. As a young man he might
have been called a wastrel, having a talent for art (he was a splendid
caricaturist) but never developing it professionally. He enrolled as a
medical student in Edinburgh, but then cheerfully neglected his stud-
ies to go out on impromptu expeditions to collect flowers, insects,
and seashells.
In his case fortune favoured the blithe of spirit. Kept alive by a small
allowance from his father, he threw himself into the mid-nineteenth-
century world of natural science, and shook it up more than a little.
At the 1839 meeting of the British Association in Birmingham, for
instance, he shrugged off the formalities of those procedure-bound
days by decamping to a local pub, the Red Lion, taking a fair propor-
tion of the attendees with him. There, in between fuelling themselves
with beef and beer, and joke and song, they debated the great scien-
tific issues of the day. Forbes's 'Red Lions' became a standard event at
subsequent British Association meetings, and some idea of their fla-
vour is given by the way that they did not express their approval or